Double Effect

Ora pro nobis!

I'm not much of a theologian, but the phrase 'double-effect' is being thrown around in the debate on abortion limits from both camps.

We all see that a reduction in the number of abortions is eminently desirable.

However, we are arguing a point of principle in the public square. What is our guiding principle? That all abortion is wrong and intrinsically evil.

Supporting a reduction in the limit of abortion to 12 or 20 weeks is problematic because surely a person voting for that is implicitly supporting the abortion of an unborn child up to that limit.

This is not merely a vote for restricting abortion - a good outcome. It is also a vote positively for abortion between 0 and 12 weeks.

The outcome is that if we support the reduction idea then we lose our argument because we have forsaken our guiding principle, saving some but, in voting, abandoning others.

Further, for the pro-life movement to sanction this would be to give credence to some government idea that life starts at 12 weeks or 20 weeks. It doesn't. Life starts at conception.

Of course the pro-abortion lobby are wounded by these suggestions from government ministers. Perhaps they are losing the argument in the public square. Now, then, surely is the time to ram the point home - life begins at conception. Abortion is the destruction of human life. To support a limit of however many weeks is not so much to compromise with evil, but to compromise your entire argument and publicly reject that basis of your guiding principle.

It strikes me that the abortion lobby is on the backfoot. Now is not the time to do deals with politicians who, we guess, do not understand the argument of the pro-life lobby, nor what abortion is, otherwise they would not suggest a restriction.

Aside from the fact that a Catholic politician would be voting for abortion up to a particular limit, we should also remember that there is much at stake in this battle. Human embryos are used, abused and discarded in IVF. Human embryos are used, abused and discarded in human embryology. A great deal of money, power and financial interest is at stake for those research companies and organisation involved in fertility and in 'medical research' in ensuring that their crimes against human life in its embryonic stage will not be stopped.

Abortion is the most visible aspect of the culture of death but think of how much evil has been allowed to engulf the World simply by the dehumanisation of the human embryo.

We are not just arguing for the end of abortion. We are also arguing for the end of the destruction and wilful commodification of human life at embryo stage being used for scientific, medical and fertility treatment. We are praying for an end to this too.

If the inalienable rights of the human embryo to life were upheld in the United Kingdom, all of these barbaric practises would fall. We are in a fight against evil, not just 'some evil'. Let us also not forget that I am led to think that the disabled will still be aborted up to birth in this legislation and that they, too, would be left out of the reprieve?

We cannot co-operate in selective breeding and birth rights. That is eugenics.

If we could, we would have saved all the Jews in the Holocaust. We couldn't. Christians and others were able to save some from slaughter. The idea, however, that should it have come to a vote that people would have proposed the rescuing of some Jews only of a certain kind of Jewishness because some people in the government recognised the humanity of some Jews of a particular strand of Judaism would be morally abominable. That would be to give tacit agreement to eugenics - that some life is more valid than others.

Were the limit to be reduced, could we actually cheer? Hardly, not while the bloodshed continues for those the government would have chosen to deny had humanity, but which we know are human. A martyr will die for a single principle. Unborn martyrs die for the lack of principles of those born.

At the same time, we would have to be quite unfeeling not to consider those who could be saved from the abortionist's hands. That's why this proposal is so divisive and pernicious - because those who refused to engage in the debate or to agree to a reduction, agree to the continuation of abortions of a wider sector of the human family in the womb. The problem, of course, is that politicians are setting the terms and conditions.

Your views, please. I'd be interested in a commenter could post up what the CDF has said on these matters.